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PROTOTYPING KIT PUTS PARTS IN PCMCIA(Computer Design - September 1995) Although billed as a prototyper's kit, a new PCMCIA development platform from Accurite Technologies (San Jose, CA) also offers designers a way to build limited production-run or special PC Cards. Headstart is a kit primarily based on a PCMCIA Release 2.1-compatible board. The board can be used to build up experimental circuits within a Type II PC Card footprint. Key to Headstart's ease of use is a predesigned PCMCIA interface. Wired and tested interface logic is already mounted on the Headstart board. All that remains for a PC Card designer to do is implement custom circuitry of choice within the board's prototyping area. Given today's high availability of multilayer boards and variety of chip packaging approaches, working with a simple prototyping board may seem less than optimal. But with care, you readily can place considerable memory and I/O mapped peripheral hardware on the board. Implementing your design directly on the final board's layout area also can cut down on design iterations. When using conventional breadboarding techniques, a design could mean repackaging and resizing a large prototype to fit a PC Card's credit-card-sized board area. On this prototyping area you can surface mount several 150- and 300-mil small-outline ICs (SOICs) and 32-, 44-, 64-, and 100-pin quad flat packs (QFPs). Passive and discrete devices can also be mounted as needed. Utility software, part of the Headstart kit, lets you program the card's EEPROM with your custom tuples as well as initialize the registers on the card's Zilog Z86M17ASC PCMCIA adapter chip. Accurite supplies data sheets for all the key chips on the board's interface and for a variety of PCMCIA card-reader-controller ICs from different vendors. The Headstart kit also includes a 25-position universal I/O cable that plugs into one end of the card, opposite the end that houses the 68-pin PCMCIA connector. Finally, frame and cover pieces are supplied. When installed, these components produce a finished card touting a high-quality, professional appearance. © Copyright 1995 Computer Design, a PennWell Publication. |